


Eddie Kaspbrak Goes for a Run

by summerpassingby



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: M/M, Pre-IT Chapter Two (2019), a wittle time shifty?, as he should!! but it hurts a little, i have my little projection too but mainly Eddie Feels Things, its about the someone being so innate to /you/ that you will always find them again, running in the rain is actually something that can be so personal AND I MEAN IT
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-01
Updated: 2020-12-01
Packaged: 2021-03-09 17:42:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27810205
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/summerpassingby/pseuds/summerpassingby
Summary: Twenty-seven years is too long for Eddie Kaspbrak to go without remembering Richie Tozier.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 4
Kudos: 19





	Eddie Kaspbrak Goes for a Run

**Author's Note:**

> this is my exercise in writing a stephen king chapter :)

Eddie Kaspbrak loves to run, possibly because he gets to do it so little. He’s always loved what he couldn’t have.

Eddie Kaspbrak loves to run so much that on a windy July evening, sky deepening with almost-rain, he phones Myra to tell her he’ll

“—be working late, don’t expect me home for dinner, deadline’s coming up so fast—”

_(almost as fast as him)_

and he hangs up without telling her he loves her, it’ll bite him in the ass later but so will this anyways and he looks up at the clouds threatening to burst on the way out of his office building two minutes later, five-o’clock sharp. He thinks he’ll do the same if he doesn’t

 _(run now let him run let him run)_

get across the street to his car and find his twice-worn sneakers that he still keeps tissue-wrapped in the box. He laces them up with trembling hands, same frantic energy as a man trying to undo his belt for the pretty girl rubbing him through his pants while he works at the buckle. He realizes he too has to undo his belt so he double-clicks his car keys and sits in the passenger seat, scrunching off his slacks and replacing them with red runner’s

_(runners let him run let him let him please)_

shorts. Before he knows it he is standing on the street again, in a plain white shirt and red shorts and twice-worn shoes, looking up at the sky for the second time and thinking _please, God, let this work_.

Then he starts to run.

Eddie Kaspbrak loves to run so much that when he starts his body, unstretched and unpracticed, his lifelong-asthmatic’s body, prone to acid reflux if he doesn’t start his morning with one and a half Tums, his body, instead of shouting out _Hey mister! youuuu can’t do this! yes you! give up!_ pushes him forward. It urges him down the first city block and then the next with young-love frantic pleasure until he’s sailing, foot-down-arm-back-foot-down, past 53rd and Broadway with the comedy club where he took that girl before Myra on a date, what was her name now? he forgets so easily … em-something, he had thought her parents must’ve been hippies … she had worn glasses, and he had thought _this seems right._

You laugh with the people you love and what a laughless night that had been, guess he really does only love what he can’t have, what a

_(Loser)_

shitty way to go about it, but he can’t help it … he loves to run.

He carries on running, his _legs_ carry _him_ on running into the city, and he starts to feel himself slowing down a little, not tiring but finding his pace, a little more aware of himself but less so of his inhaler, which sits abandoned in the cupholder of his car in Brooklyn. He carries on running.

He runs past the Apollo, ducks around the man changing the letters on the sign and glances up at the show being advertised. Two years later on his way out of the newly-built _Jade of the Orient_ he will remember this moment faintly and realize it is three letters off from reading THE FUN’S JUST BEGINNING, realize this is the name of soon-to-be-negotiated deal for a Netflix special by a comedian named Richie Tozier whose name has already been stuck up in full by the man changing the letters. He will remember watching it on a whim one night, feel his secret shame for doing so intensified by the fact that he hates it. He will think _asshole! you don’t write your own material!_ and say it out loud six months after that to Richie Tozier himself

_(oh God Richie Tozier you all know Richie … Richie … )_

but for now he runs too fast to process anything past _RICH—_

 _a soaking-wet Eddie Kaspbrak yells for the second time._ _“Your window’s open! I know you’re there!”_

_A second later Richie Tozier opens the front door, standing back from the almost-horizontal downpour. Eddie Kaspbrak smiles wide for the second time that afternoon—the first, from when he picked up speed a block past his house, running shoes skipping against the pavement, only half-faded more than twenty minutes on. He’s always loved what made him smile._

_“Heard ya, Eds,” Richie smiles, and moves out of the way to let him in._

_“You should close it,” Eddie says. “Your room’s going to get soaked.”_

_“You’re an expert on that.”_

_“Very fucking funny,” Eddie says, and stands dripping awkwardly on the carpet behind Richie’s door, trying not to give the rest of the house the same treatment as Richie’s bedroom._

_“I know, that’s why I said it,” Richie yells out as he disappears without explanation up the stairs, leaving Eddie, goosebumps starting to appear on his arms, alone with the sound of rain hitting the windows._

_Suddenly he realizes that he is_ here _. It is a shock wave to his_

(lifelong-asthmatic’s body, prone to acid reflux if he doesn’t start his morning with one and a half Tums)

_system, and a knowledge far beyond his fifteen years. Twenty-five years beyond them, in fact; twenty-five years from now he will crash his car remembering_

(Richie Tozier oh Jesus Richie)

_it all but for now all he feels is a pulling, deep desire; premature nostalgia for the Eddie Kaspbrak standing here soaking wet and a gutting, cramping pain for the Eddie Kaspbrak still sailing down Broadway on his feet that are finally letting him run, asthma forgotten and only this pain left, the pain of knowing, if only for a brief second because it_

(isn’t time yet! not quite! few more years to go, can ya make it?)

_all disappears anyways when Richie Tozier comes back downstairs carrying a towel and one of his sweaters, it’s the one with LOS ANGELES and a palm tree on it, plus what looks like a pair of sweats, and says_

_“D’you want to borrow this? You can wait out the storm here.”_

_Eddie knows he shouldn’t have come here, the shit he’ll get for coming home soaking wet is the_ _same shit he’ll get for coming home in a sweater that’s not his, that’s_ Richie’s, _but he’s already here and it’s too late and he_ wants _to wear Richie’s sweater, wants to feel like him or maybe close to him so he nods and says back_

_“Thanks, Rich,” and really means it._

_He changes into Richie’s clothes in his bathroom, out of shorts exactly the same shade of red as the one’s he’ll put on frantically twenty-three years from now and slowly into Richie’s sweatpants, then the sweatshirt, both warm and clean like they’re fresh out of the dryer, and knows he is safe._

_When he comes out of the bathroom Richie has two cups of hot chocolate balanced on the edge of his cluttered bedside table. Eddie picks one up. It has pink marshmallows, a fact that makes the softest parts of Eddie ache in a way he doesn’t yet understand, childhood-ache, gentle._

_“How far’d you go today?” Richie asks. It is one question in an infinite sequence of the same easy intimacy._

_“Made it to the library and looped twice before I got fucking rained out.” Eddie pushes his shoulders back as he says it. He remembers when going straight from his house to Richie’s felt like_

(twenty-three years oh God has it really been that long? Since Richie? I am thirty-eight years old thirty-eight and only now remembering what his sweater felt like on my skin how did I go so long … )

_an eternity._

_He is proud of how far he can run. Briefly Eddie remembers the echo of his feet pounding on the pavement, fifteen and thirty-eight together, and as fast as his feet come the feeling goes._

_“Neat-O,” Richie replies. “You want some more hot chocolate?”_

_Eddie glances out the window, and as he notices that it has stopped raining—the sun is returning, the sun too bright for the day, for them sat here in Richie’s room, on Richie’s bed, easy intimacy—Eddie jolts himself back to reality, wherever it is. “S’alright, I should get going. My mom’ll freak if I’m not home soon.”_

_He stands up to go. “Can I keep your sweater for now?”_

_Richie says, “as long as you want, Eds…”_

_and Eddie almost runs out of the room because he loves to run and because he understands that Richie means that more than he says, but he stays and looks at Richie for a second, Rich Tozier, forever getting off a good one, not quite_ his _Richie but nearly there, bug eyes and bucktoothed smile saying_

(Eds he called me Eds I loved it when he called me Eds)

_something in a shitty Voice, the Eddie Kaspbrak who has long-since run past the sign for his show at the Apollo wonders if this Richie Tozier still does Voices…_

_The Eddie Kaspbrak in Richie’s bedroom, who is really both of them and all of them, stays a second longer than he means too, looking at Richie because he loves to look at Richie, and that same childhood ache takes him over again. It is the ache of loving._

_Eddie walks halfway home before the sky, quick as him and almost as unexpectedly, clouds over again and like a symphony on the beat after a crack of thunder opens up and rains for the second time that day._

_Richie’s sweater, even soaking-wet, smells like him._

_It keeps smelling like him after Eddie puts it through the dryer, in the same load as his bedsheets so his mother won’t see. That night Eddie marvels again at how it still smells like him, that fresh-cut grassy soap and something else he can’t name but would recognize anywhere, as he holds it against him in bed dreaming of almost-his Richie._

_It smells like him, like hope, like one day he and Richie … one day, would’ve been today, wouldn’t it have? in his unseeing or maybe more-seeing fifteen-year-old mind?_

_What a world he had had then, full of monsters and love and hope and possibility and terror and friends and fear and Richie Tozier who he loved just as much as his other friends but not in the same way, parallel lines of love, and it makes sense that he loves what he can’t have because he’s thirty-eight and his chest is starting to heave is it this body doing it? this memory? a natural fact of being Eddie Kaspbrak?_

With a crack the symphony-downpour starts. It will be the worst storm New York has seen in a decade, the worst since a week to the day before Eddie married Myra, in fact, but for now it is just the downpour that Eddie Kaspbrak realizes is washing him away or washing him back, he doesn’t know which, only knows the sinking fear that he is Orpheus in this story.

Here is Eddie Kaspbrak looking up at the sky, crying along with the rain. He can’t tell which is which wetting his cheeks, only knows that

_(Richie his name was Richie Richie Richie Richie I called him Rich sometimes he called me Eds didn’t he? oh he called me Eds he … )_

his chest is heaving and he has forgotten something and his side is cramping now, this is what happens when you run without warming-up, without being ready, and he feels like throwing up at the impossible fact of

_(Rich … )_

his forgetting.

There are tears running down his cheeks, he knows it now; knows everyone else knows it too.

This is the greatest and most terrible pain Eddie will ever feel, at least until he crashes his car listening to Mike Hanlon speak for the first time in nearly thirty years and he is fine but it feels like the world has gone wrong and all his insides have been flipped upside-down.

Despite this pain he keeps running. It is the only thing he can do now. The rain washes over him and it is as soft as Richie’s sweatshirt and his touch, even though he doesn’t know who Richie is anymore and will not, not really, until Richie leans in towards him at the cistern and says desperately _what is it, Eddie?_ and Eddie tells him

 _(Richie… you know I…)_.

Until then Eddie Kaspbrak is left with an ache in his chest and a burn in his lungs.

Eddie Kaspbrak loves to run, in spite of or maybe for this burn.

**Author's Note:**

> Ah hope you like it! I always wonder since all the Losers are relatively famous what they would feel encountering each other between when they left Derry and 2016, esp with in the movie Bill saying Audra wears all Rogan-Marsh clothes and, ofc, Eddie saying he fucking knew Richie didn't write his own material :) would they ache? because i sure do!!! lol
> 
> @astudyinsubtext on tumblr if you would like to say hi


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